Muriel Award: Best Directorial Body of Work of the Decade
So if you were privy to the mix-up from earlier this week, you already know who the winner of this category is. But if not… well, like the old NBC slogan went, “It’s new to you!”
Joel & Ethan Coen [114 points/18 votes]
“What more can one say about the immensely gifted Coen duo? The brothers have been the defining American auteurs since their 1984 debut Blood Simple, and have continued to redefine and develop their peculiar and miraculous sense of storytelling with nearly every new film they offer. Consider the mostly consistent and often daring work from this past decade: O Brother, Where Art Thou?, The Man Who Wasn’t There, Intolerable Cruelty, The Ladykillers, No Country For Old Men, Burn After Reading, A Serious Man. Okay, so is a minor hiccup with two uninspired back-to-back mainstream comedies enough to distract from what was an otherwise stellar output these past 10 years? Of course not. First of all, a great Coen film, or a Coen masterwork, is a much richer and fulfilling experience than just about anything else out there right now in American film. I think we got two masterworks this decade with the bleaker-than-bleak Cormac McCarthy adaptation, No Country For Old Men, with its pitch-perfect pacing and utter command of tone and tension (perhaps their most impeccably structured and visually intense work to date), and the hilarious/horrifying A Serious Man, their most puzzling and personal work since Barton Fink. These films, along with the universally praised (and rightly so) O Brother, Where Art Thou? and the underrated The Man Who Wasn’t There bring up the most obvious but important point about these extraordinary filmmakers: there’s always something new about a Coen film, something you’ve never seen or experienced, or something seemingly ordinary that’s distorted in the most inventive of ways. Though they draw inspiration from a familiar well of storied Hollywood filmmaking, there’s nothing formulaic or predictable about their stories, and there’s always a sequence or two (or three) from each film that will be imprinted in your memory forever. Right now I’m all about A Serious Man, so I think the best example is the design and execution of the bar mitzvah sequence and the way the suspense and humor builds as the young boy walks up to the Torah - nervous, frightened, stoned out of his mind - the images blur as he tries to ready himself for the inevitable reading, and the hellish scratching sound of the Yad as the Rabbi drags it down to the exact line to begin the service. The mix of exaggerated drug-induced imagery and amplified sound is so precise and effective for that moment that you have to marvel at their directorial control and storytelling creativity. To be able to display that skill in four or five movies a decade is something we’re lucky to have. It’s really as simple as that.” — Ari Dassa
(For the record, I think Intolerable Cruelty is ridiculously underrated - Preston Sturges after a psychotic break - and will go to the mat to defend it any time. But that’s just me.)
Runners-up:
Christopher Nolan [74/10]
Steven Soderbergh [60/10]
Paul Thomas Anderson [45/7]
Lars Von Trier [44/8]
